Comments by "Xiphoid Process" (@xiphoid2011) on "China Is Monopolising the Global Industry" video.

  1. I wonder how the non-existent shipping industry in the US still are building the worlds largest carriers. All kidding aside, I think you mean commercial ship building, yeah, US workers are.more expensive so for maximizing profitability, manufacturing in the US is never going to give you the cost advantage. Although with the decoupling and friend shoring, manufacturing in S. Korea (for civilian shipping) and Mexico are good alternatives to China.
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  2.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  Being chinese I know how much low cost labor plays into the equation. You are correct that cheap labor is only a part of the equation, but it's probably the biggest part. If you look at history, US first off shored commercial ship building to Japan, this caused the rise of Japan's ship building industry. Then when Japanese labor became too expensive, it was off shored to South Korea, which lead it its dominance today. And then China came when South Korea labor for ship building also become expensive. So you see, in all the cases, the labor cost is the main driver for each of the rise in their respective shipping industry. Today, some of that labor advantage can be off-set by increase automation (which is the main advantage of S.Korean ship building vs China's, still more expensive but being higher enough quality to stay in business). South Korea actual has higher % of automation (more robots per person) than any country by quite a large margin. However, with the US labor cost being even higher than S. korea by far, and it's civilian ship building industry being long gone, it's basically only doing military ship building which not being profit driven is not very price sensitive.
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  3.  @Western_Decline  Raw number is meaningless. A tiny country would naturally have fewer robots. Look at how many robots per worker. South Korea trumps China by far. Chinese workers are still cheap, which means it still doesn't make financial sense to use robots in place of workers in a lot of places. (corrected grammar).
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  4. ​​ @Nom_AnorVSJedi The current financial struggle in China is real. Most of my family is still in Shanghai, and it's tough going. My nephew who just graduated can't find a job, like much is not most of the new college grads. If my home town of shanghai is having a rough time, you can bet its worse in tier 2 cities and below. You can see read about it from fellow chinese on weibo.
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  5.  @雅君墨客-i9z  don't get me wrong, China has come a long way since I was little. But cheap labor is still a major part of what propels the Chinese industry. You don't need stastics to tell you that. It's all plain to see for us. I'm from shanghai, my family has been fortunate, but no so for all the people who came from else where. The laborer working in those ship yards are mostly not the expensive Shanghainese but immigrant laborers, this is a big part of why cheap ship building moved down stream to China, and likely will continue to move down the price chain. This is why shanghainese generally look down on them, call them 乡下人，苏北人, and these last couple of years even want these migrant labors out of shanghai since the recent economic down turn has lead to them being homeless. When we just ignore the daily CCTV for once, we can see that cheap labor (along with good infrastructure to transport goods) is a predominent factor of manufacturing in China, and is one of the main reason (other than property bubble) of China's ecnomic slump -- cheap labor means low consumption, and the government's decades long policy to maintain cheap labor to stimulate export has lead to this moment.
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